Sunday, 26 July 2009

I'm going to do a small series of mini-guides aimed at getting the most out of the 4 strategic cruisers that are curretly available on the market.

Now I'll be the first to say that this is pretty much all theorycrafting, as I've had very limited experience with these 'in the field' so if theres any really obvious bits I've missed, feel free to leave a comment and ill see about incorporating it in a revised version of each of the guides.

Now, disclaimer aside... heres the first of the guides, aimed at the Caldari Tengu.

Thursday, 16 July 2009

We've been wardecced again... nothing major, it happens every few weeks it seems.

However, this one is quite different in that they secluded a spy within our ranks a few weeks prior to the war going active...

We took on a new member who hung around with us for a few days, and after a few sessions where they joined us on level 4 missions, the guy seemed quite chatty and was quite well trained (able to solo level 4 missions at least) so we thought we would give him a go.

Anyway... after we were wardecced, we begun to suspect that there could be 'eyes in the camp' so to speak after the enemy seemed to anticipate our move - so we set a trap.

Publically, we set up a fleet that everything was known, and waited for the enemy to travel to us, in a system we dont usually form up in - sure enough they arrived in relatively short notice (now admittedly, I know that it was possible to just use a locator agent to search us out, but it was way too quick) and we sprung the trap - the secret, second fleet we had jumped in from the system over and we pincered the enemy.

Ultimately there werent many deaths, the enemy scattered, but now that they have lost their mole, the enemy have been very disorganised and its been much easier to trap them in ones and twos and pick them off.

In fact, so much so, they had resorted to posting fake killmails on our killboard (which ultimately, it was something we forgot the spy had access to still, but a quick password change has altered that)

Friday, 10 July 2009

Between the members of my corp, and the alliance that we are in the process of getting set up, we are looking to expand, to get a decent amount of members flying under our banner.

Eventually as the alliance, we are hoping to get a foothold in 0.0 space once we have the logistics and supply chain sorted out, but at the moment, we are quite happy with a mix of Highsec (industry/missioning) and Lowsec (anti-pirate) operations under our belt.

What we are looking for primarily (corps or individuals):

PVP focused players - we have a decent industrial backbone now in order to cheaply replace ship losses, and once we have enough cash in the pot from our in house industrial manufacturing processes, provide replacement ships lost in the line of duty. Whilst a lot of our members have decent experience of PVP, we have identified that we need more who are willing to get into the thick of the action.

If you are fine with standard NRDS rules, which are focused strictly in antipirate operations, we'd be happy to chat with you or your corp.

Experienced battle commanders would be of a great benefit.

Industrialists - We have a cash generating programme in place to fund alliance activities. We ask that industrialist players with suitable skills donate 1-2 of their manufacturing slots every now and again to build out projects that are alliance funded, which the alliance will then sell on to retain the profits for future alliance activities.

All timezones - We have members active in all timezones (as far as I know... Ive not been awake 24 hours to see), I dont think that should be any limitation to anyone who wants to join.

I'll try and flesh this out a little more a little later, but if you are interested, either drop me a line on karoxlominax@googlemail.dom, send me an eve mail in game, or reply below, and we can see about arranging time for a chat to see what we can do to help each other out.

Thursday, 9 July 2009

No doubt you may all be aware, but a few days before EON 16 was shipped out of the door, CCP released a patch which adjusted several factors to do with Tech 3 manufacturing.

It seems that its possible to get more than 3 runs now on a Tech 3 blueprint - i'm still trying to find out exactly what the effects are from the patch, but I've seen a few 10 run subsystem blueprints, so im not sure if thats the new default (I've only seen 10 run or 3 runs on the contracts at the moment, I'd appreciate some confirmation from anyone who may have done some reverse engineering since the patch)

Update: Seems that the new blueprint rates are 20 run for intact relic-run reverse engineering jobs, 10 runs for Malfunctioning relic run RE jobs, and 3 run for Wrecked relic run RE jobs - at least for subsystems anyway... still waiting to find out the breakdown of figures for the ship hulls. Theres still some issues with it as per Letrane's comments below though.

Secondly, the material requirements for the 'Fulleroferocene Power Conduits' has changed - the 4 units of Carbon-86 Epoxy Resin have been removed from the blueprint, and instead 10 units of 'Scandium Metallofullerene' have been added in its place.

You never know... maybe next time I put an article in EON, hopefully CCP wont change things just prior to it coming off the presses.

Monday, 6 July 2009

No doubt everyones been up to date with the buzz from the recent Dev Blog on prospective changes for Apocrypha 1.5, specifically of which, the new plans for multi-sized rigs (which by the way, seems to have been in discussion for months, since it seemed to go very quiet after it was planned for when Quantum Rise hit and it wasn't included then)

Now the one thing that springs to mind for me is trying to figure out which rigs will become useless in the future. I mean take gravity capacitor rigs for instance. They're fit to a whole lot of covops and recon ships to assist with probing, but as the current ones would class as the 'large' version, and theres no battleship sized scanner craft, that basically makes every gravity capacitor blueprint out there all but obsolete, as the large sized rig wont have any sales (at least unless theres something I've missed)

Now as well as that, I'm needing to find out for certain if the rigs can be refined/reprocessed back to salvage... its something that I've never tried. If they can, it shouldnt be a problem, but if they can't, expect the current gravity capacitor rigs to freefall in price close to patch day.

On top of that, the dev blog goes into thing such as looking at the downsides to rigs, and possibly putting negatives to some rigs (im presuming capacitor based ones here) or revaluating the current downsides to see if they're fair and balanced. Heres hoping that there may also be a bit of a revamp of the bonuses that some rigs give, as in some cases, the tech 2 rigs are worse than the tech 1 versions due to the calibration costs that apply to them.

Still, plenty to think about and plan... and hopefully we should have apocrypha 1.5 before the end of August (heres to keeping my fingers crossed)

Wednesday, 1 July 2009

Maybe this post is going to be some psychoanalysts dream, but is there anyone else out there who finds that once a goal is achieved in a game such as an MMO for instance, then that game loses a lot of its thrill ?

A good example is hitting the 8.0 standings to use jump clones with a corp - you spend weeks and weeks with a goal, focused on getting it, and once you do finally reach it, you get this gigantic anticlimactic 'meh' feeling as if theres nothing decent to do with your time now, and struggle to adjust to the 'nothing new to do' mentality.

I find it happens a lot with single player games, you go through to get the best gun, or whatever, and then all enthusiasm for a game drops off the map for me... I've got dozens of games out there that I just stopped playing, in fact I've only actually successfully completed about 5-10 games in my entire life from a catalogue of hundreds.

I know this sounds a bit strange with the whole 'goal related achievements mentality' thing but I usually find that theres something new came along that I want to try after I hit the 'wall' in one game and monotony has set in, so I very rarely see the end of it.

I suppose thats why I quite like MMOs too - theres no real goal to it other than constant improvement, so even if I do get a short term feeling of depression that I've achieved a goal, theres always other players/friends to spur me on and give me other suggestions for things to turn my hand to. In conjunction to there being no real 'end' of the game until the servers are switched off, its a good excuse to pop in and out as the interest waxes and wanes.